Heat Lightning

by Michaela Thompson

  Praise for Michaela Thompson and HURRICANE SEASON:

  “(Michaela Thompson) knows how to create that sense of place, which is so important to any novel but particularly to crime fiction; her characters are believable men and women in a real world, her mystery is credible, and in Lily Trulock she has created a middle-aged heroine who is both original and sympathetic.”

  —P.D. James

  “I enjoyed the book. It has real people in a real place, factors which seem to be ever more rare these days— even though it is the only way to create a real suspension of disbelief.”

  —John D. MacDonald

  “Sterling dialogue, drily comic atmosphere, but a pulse of grim reality too: Miss Marple meets Eudora Welty (with a trace of Erskine Caldwell)…”

  —Kirkus

  “With the kind of realism that stems from William Faulkner, the author skillfully portrays her inbred, suspicious, nasty people… Hurricane Season ends up an orthodox murder mystery, but it is more than that. In a way, [Michaela Thompson] has attempted a microcosm of America, carefully dissecting out a single cell under a very strong lens. She writes with unusual confidence, particularly in her account of a gritty love affair…she has written a murder mystery that happens only two or three times a year.”

  —New York Times

  HEAT LIGHTNING

  BY

  Michaela Thompson

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Heat Lightning

  Copyright 2017 by Michaela Thompson

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  ISBN: 978-0-9973630-5-0

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: 2017

  www.booksbnimble.com

  HOW ABOUT A FREE BOOK?

  Keep up to date on terrific new books, and get a freebie at the same time!

  First click here to join our mailing list and get Louisiana Hotshot!

  Confirmed grump Eddie Valentino placed the ad. Hotshot twenty-something Talba Wallis knew exactly how to answer it.

  And thus was born the dynamic duo of New Orleans private detectives, one cynical, sixty-five-year-old Luddite white dude with street smarts, and one young, bright-eyed, Twenty-First century African-American female poet, performance artist, mistress of disguise, and computer jock extraordinaire. Think Queen Latifah and Danny DeVito in a hilariously rocky relationship— yet with enough detective chops between them to find Atlantis.

  5.0 out of 5 stars Julie Smith’s Triumphant Return

  Long time fans of Julie Smith's witty mysteries will not be disappointed by this new title. Spinning off a character from her latest Skip Langdon mystery “82 Desire”, Talba Wallis, this book definitely ranks up there with Smith's Edgar Award winning “New Orleans Mourning.”

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  How About a Free Book?

  Start Reading

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Our Guarantee

  A Respectful Request

  Also by Michaela Thompson

  About the Author

  heat lightning: A flash or flashes of light seen near the horizon, especially on warm evenings, believed to be the reflection of distant lightning on high clouds.

  1975

  It was a suffocating summer night. The waves on St. Elmo Beach slipped listlessly over the sand, and the moon was obscured by haze. There was little traffic on the dark, two-lane highway that hugged the coast.

  Across the road from the beach, a beacon of activity in the languid scene, the red neon sign of the Gulf Dream Lounge cast a glow over the crowded oyster-shell parking lot. Anyone walking into the Gulf Dream would be immersed in the smell of spilled beer and sweat, the babble of raised, possibly drunken, voices, and the sound of “Delta Dawn” playing at full volume on the jukebox. The place was packed, with every table taken and no elbow room at the bar. Down a dim hall, in a back room, the regular weekly poker game was in session. It was a typical summer night.

  Behind the Lounge, a short distance up a side road, was a row of rundown stucco cottages. Flat roofed and vaguely Spanish in style, they were connected by a concrete walkway. Scrubby cabbage palms overlooked a bumpy asphalt parking lot. A sign identified these cottages as the Gulf Dream Villas.

  In one of the villas, a man and a woman were clinging to one another with a feverish, thoughtless desperation. In the dark, humid room the air conditioner rumbled to little avail.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” the woman said, her voice muffled by the man’s chest. “Daddy saw my husband in town today. If he comes looking—”

  “I had to see you,” the man murmured. “You can tell, can’t you? I couldn’t wait.”

  “Me neither.” The woman sounded almost tearful. “But if Coby finds out, he’ll do something. And he’s mean.”

  “Does he know where you’re living?” She rocked her head against him. Negative. In a rush of breath, she said, “He asked Daddy, but Daddy wouldn’t tell him.

  “Daddy’s going to get a gun. He says that bastard isn’t going to lay a hand on his daughter or his grandkids.”

  The man sighed. In a somber whisper he said, “You want me to go, then?”

  “No!” Her voice broke. “I don’t want you to go. It’ll be all right. Don’t go, baby. Stay with me. Please, please stay.”

  1975

  On a hot summer morning in 1975, Alice Rhodes didn’t show up at her job at the air base. Fifteen minutes into the work day another secretary, Patsy Orr, tapped her colleague Merle Evans on the shoulder. Merle glanced up, saw that it was Patsy, and her face hardened a little. Patsy had that effect on people. “Alice hasn’t come in yet,” Patsy said in a low voice.

  Merle, her paperwork spread out, glanced over at Alice’s empty desk. “I guess not,” she said.

  Patsy’s eyes loomed large, magnified by the lenses of her harlequin glasses. “What if something’s wrong?” she said. Her hands were trembling. She clasped them in front of her copious bosom and waited for the dismissal that would surely come.

  Merle checked her watch. She said, “Patsy, she’s eleven minutes late. Maybe her car broke down.” She turned back to her work.

  Patsy hovered for a few seconds before returning to her desk. She waited another half hour before approaching Merle again. When Merle looked up, Patsy said, “Merle, I had a dream about her.”

  Merle lowered her eyes to her work. “About who?”

  “Alice. I had a dream, and now—”

  Merle turned fully around and looked Patsy in the eye. “I have got to get this done, Patsy. You’re going to have to excuse me.”

  In the end, it was two hours into the work day before the Colonel told Patsy and Merle, the only other secretaries who commuted to the base from St. Elmo, to drive over to St. Elmo Beach and check on Alice Rhodes. He himself had tried calling, and there was no answer at Alice’s apartment. Still, alerting the police didn’t make sense at this stage of the game. He preferred to keep the situation within his control until he learned what was going on.

  Patsy and Merle took Merle’s car. Leaving the base, they drove east through dense pine woods that lined the two lane highway. Merle, in the driver’s seat, was silent, her eyes on the road. At last Patsy said, “I did have a dream, Merle. About Alice.”

  Merle made a sound like, “Huh.”

  Patsy went on, “I dreamed I was walking up to her apartment at Gulf Dream Villas. You know her front window? The big one?”

  Merle didn’t answer.

  “Well, in my dream th
e curtain was closed, but when I was walking up toward the front door a man pulled the curtain back and looked out. He looked right at me, and his eyes were strange, and he had a funny look on his face.” Patsy shivered and rubbed her arms. “When he saw me, he dropped the curtain. It was so real, Merle.” Her voice quavered.

  “It was a dream, Patsy.”

  “Well, yes it was.” Patsy nodded several times. “It scared me so bad I told Alice the next day at lunch. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I said, ‘Alice, you got to be careful.’”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She laughed. She patted my arm and she said, ‘Don’t you worry about me, Patsy. I’m always careful.’ ”

  “Well, there it is. She said it herself.”

  “I know, but—” Patsy extracted a tissue from her bag and blew her nose.

  Merle took her eyes off the road briefly to glance over at Patsy. She said, “Patsy, you and I don’t know the half of what Alice Rhodes gets up to.”

  Patsy blinked. “What do you mean?” The question had a defensive tone.

  “She’s not a girl. She’s thirty-five if she’s a day. And I know she’s pretty and sweet, and she smiles at everybody. But you know what? When her husband Coby took off, she gave her two children to her parents to raise. Just like that. And she moved right out of town to the beach and got her own place.” Merle gave a little huff of breath, and her hands tightened on the wheel.

  “She told me all about that,” Patsy said. “Coby took off. She had to get a job to support the children. She got hired at the air base, and she needed a place to live close enough to drive over there and back every day, and she needed somebody to look after the children. She felt bad about it, Merle.”

  “Maybe she did,” Merle said. “But that didn’t stop her from having a good time when she felt like it. We know ourselves that she’s been dating the airmen. And she’s been seen at the Gulf Dream Lounge more than once, and when she’s there she’s always got company.”

  “She has always been real nice to me,” Patsy said. “One time, she gave me a lipstick that was almost brand new because she said it was the wrong shade for her.”

  Merle didn’t answer. The pine forest was thinning, and the roadside signs warned of a reduction in the speed limit. Soon, the beach came into view on the right-hand side: St. Elmo Bay gleaming deep blue in the blinding sun, dunes covered with sea oats and other rough grasses.

  They continued along the highway past modest cottages, a filling station or two, a fishing pier. The Gulf Dream Lounge was coming up on their left-hand side. The crushed-shell parking lot was deserted, and the place looked desolate in the morning light. Just before they reached it, Merle turned left on a side road and drove up a gentle rise to a line of yellow stucco cottages. A sign at the entrance to the parking lot said Gulf Dream Villas. Merle said, “She’s in number two, isn’t she?”

  “That’s right. Looks like her car’s there,” Patsy said.

  “Well, maybe she’s there.” Merle pulled up and parked under the palms.

  “Maybe she’s sick,” Patsy said.

  The heat was intense, the sun brilliant. The women got out of the car and moved toward cottage number two. Merle opened the screen and gave the front door a brisk knock.

  The door moved inward. Merle looked over her shoulder at Patsy, hovering behind. “It isn’t even latched,” she said. More tentatively now, she gave the door a push. “Alice?” she called. “It’s Merle and Patsy.”

  The two women walked into a small entry that opened on a living room. And there, in the diffuse light that filtered through the front curtain, they saw Alice Rhodes lying on the carpet. She was on her side, naked, unmoving, a tumble of yellow hair covering her bloody face.

  Merle stepped back, bumping into Patsy. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no.” She started to cry.

  “I dreamed it,” Patsy said, her voice shaking. “I told you I dreamed it, Merle.” She walked past Merle and walked past Alice’s body to the telephone table in the hall. She picked up the phone to call the police.

  PART ONE

  – 1 –

  2015

  Clara Trent woke with a start. Although the air conditioner was on, she was sweating, her hair damp. She sat up. Judging by the pale gray light filtering through the bedroom curtains, it was early in the morning.

  This was unusual. Because of the pill she took at bedtime, she usually passed the night in a kind of stupor, sometimes waking to stare into the dark and stumble to the bathroom, collapsing into unconsciousness again as soon as she returned to bed.

  She almost never dreamed, which was a good thing, and she hadn’t been dreaming just now, not that she recalled. Still, for some reason she had a distinct feeling of dread, which had lingered into her wakefulness. She looked around the room. When her eye passed over an array of hats hanging on the wall she noticed the empty hook and thought: Oh yeah. Right.

  Today, the investigator from St. Elmo was coming back. Clara told herself she would be relieved to have the matter cleared up. Ronan, her husband, had been dead not even four months when the investigator— she had forgotten his name— had turned up to talk with Clara about a long-ago case in St. Elmo. Clara barely took in what he was saying: first, because she was medicated, second because what he was saying was unbelievable, and third— she couldn’t remember the third reason. Well, third was probably because she didn’t want to take it in, couldn’t take it in, and refused to take it in. She wrote down the name of the woman who was murdered. The paper was in her bedside table, but she didn’t need to take it out. The victim’s name was Alice Rhodes, a name Clara had never heard until the investigator said it.

  The investigator, whose name she should’ve written down but hadn’t, told her he had reopened a cold case, the murder of Alice Rhodes. Alice Rhodes had been killed back in 1975, several years before Clara and Ronan met. With apologies and murmurs of eliminating Ronan from inquiries, the investigator asked if he might borrow something that had belonged to her late husband in order to get a sample of Ronan’s DNA. Ronan, it seemed, had been a neighbor of Alice Rhodes at a place called Gulf Dream Villas on St. Elmo Beach, about an hour’s drive from Clara’s home in Luna Bay. Ronan was one of a number of people who had been questioned about her death at the time.

  Clara’s reaction had been along the lines of: After everything I’ve been through— now this? She was pretty sure she’d asked the investigator if he was aware that her husband Ronan was dead, had been dead four months, and the investigator had said he was aware of that and he was very sorry to trouble her and sorry for her loss.

  Clara had convinced herself, momentarily, that the fact of Ronan’s death settled the matter, but then the investigator had asked again, in a gentle tone, if she could let him borrow something of Ronan’s to send off to the lab. She could see, in his brown eyes, the set of his mouth, the posture of his body, that no matter how calm and pleasant his voice sounded he was not going to leave her house without something of Ronan’s. At that point, she got up, went to the bedroom, took from the hook the hat Ronan always used to wear when he painted outdoors, and brought it back to the investigator. Let him test whatever he pleased. If there was one thing Clara knew it was that Ronan Trent had never killed anybody, and that included this woman— Alice Rhodes. Ronan had been an artist. He had been crazy, antisocial, and weird. He had not killed anybody. Let the investigator send the hat off and eliminate Ronan from his inquiries.

  The investigator promptly took the hat and then took his leave, probably fearing that she would change her mind before he could get out the door.

  She had heard nothing more of the matter until yesterday, when he had called and asked if he could come talk with her.

  Clara had balked. She had said, “Can’t we talk now? Talk on the phone?”

  “I’d really like to talk with you in person, Mrs. Trent. Can I come to Luna Bay and meet with you this afternoon?”

  “I have to be in the gallery this afternoon. It’s my
assistant’s day off.”

  “Tomorrow morning, then?”

  She had consented. He was set to arrive at eleven a.m., which was still hours away.

  Clara lay back against the pillows, gazing at the empty hook where Ronan’s hat used to hang.

  – 2 –

  Shortly after nine that morning Aaron Malone, an investigator for the St. Elmo County Sheriff’s Department, walked across the courthouse parking lot to his car, sank into the broiling driver’s seat, put the air conditioner on full blast, and took the highway out of St. Elmo, heading east. Aaron was a tanned, strongly-built man with graying dark hair and only a few extra pounds on his tall frame. His brown eyes had a tendency to telegraph his emotions, despite the restraint he had learned in his many years in law enforcement. He was not looking forward to the day in front of him, which promised not just one, but two difficult encounters, one of them with his mother.

  His mother would call him Junior, which nobody else had called Aaron since sixth grade. Worse, his mother would ask him— over and over and over— where Stacey was, and if Stacey was coming to see her. When this first started, after his mother went to the rehab place after a stroke, Aaron had weaseled about Stacey. For the first couple of visits, he told his mother that maybe Stacey could make it next time. Eventually, he had felt compelled to say, slowly and emphatically, “Mama, maybe you don’t remember that Stacey and I are divorced. She’s married to a snowbird now, and she lives with him up in northern Michigan. In a house by a lake.” (The “house by a lake” part really rankled Aaron.)

  His mother seemed to take this in, staring at him round-eyed. Then she blinked and said, “But where is Stacey? When is she coming to see me?”

  Anyway, all that was for later. First, he had Mrs. Trent to deal with.

  Clara Trent, the real reason for Aaron’s trip, made Aaron uncomfortable. She was almost as tall as Aaron himself but, unlike Aaron, she was thin. Her eyes were light blue, her straight hair a silvery color. She had worn a loose gray dress, very plain. She wasn’t much younger than Aaron if she was younger at all, and you couldn’t call her a beauty— or at least Aaron wouldn’t. On top of that, she had a steady gaze that seemed to assess not only Aaron himself but his entire life, and find it wanting.